ACROSS THE WORLD.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20343, 26 August 1929, Page 14

ACROSS THE WORLD.

BOY SPEAKS TO MOTHER,

A WIRELESS-TELEPHONE TALK

TOUCHING HOSPITAL INCIDENT. "You should meet my mother, nurse—• she's just wonderftil. And I knew her voice as soon as she said 'How are you, Jack?' She's a lovely mother, nurse." Jack Sigrist, whose name was still on the danger list at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital when (lie last mail left Sydney, went into ecstacies when ho spoke of his conversation across the world with his mother the previous day. lie clasped his hands and his eyes glistened with suppressed tears. All day he wanted to talk about tho remarkable wireless-telephone conversation which had reached from Sydney to sleepy Gosport in England.

"D'you know what sho said, nurse V lie asked; and then answered his query. "She said that sho is going to send mo some photographs; and I'm going to send some to her. I told her I was all right, but she'll worry just the same, My mother's liko that."

"Now you will have to bo a good boy and keep quiet," said tho nurso to her pale 18-year-old patient, a patient who was still holding on to life by very slender threads. His pathetic enthusiasm and his poignant references to his -mother caused doctors, nurses and other patients in the long, white ward to hide their emotions behind a smile and words of cheery encouragement. Jack was intensely excited by the conversation with his mother, and tho medical authorities were waiting to seo whether tho conversation with bis mother would provide that missing factor that was wanted to assist his recovery. The dreadful injury to his thigh caused by his fall down tho hold of the Cunard steamer Yalacia still caused him excruciating pain, which, the doctors say, he was enduring with remarkable fortitude. lie was far too ill to receive visitors.